The novel centres on Carel Fisher, an eccentric Anglican priest who is the rector of a London church which was destroyed by bombing during World War II.
At the beginning of the novel, he has just been put in charge of a church that was heavily damaged by bombing in the Second World War, so that only the tower and the rectory remain standing.
Carel Fisher performs no church functions and refuses to admit anyone to the rectory or to communicate with anyone, including his brother, Marcus, who is nominally the co-guardian of their niece Elizabeth.
[2]: 13 Marcus twice gains entrance to the house by stealth, and on each occasion he has a harrowing conversation with his brother, who insists that there is no God, and that in any case "goodness is impossible for us".
After his death Muriel and Elizabeth set up house together elsewhere in London, while Pattie goes to Africa to work in a refugee camp, and the rectory and church tower are demolished to make way for new development.
[3] During the time when Murdoch was writing the novel, she was engaged as a philosopher with this and related issues, and published her own book on the subject, The Sovereignty of Good, in 1970.
The New York Times reviewer Walter Allen, though critical of Murdoch's novels becoming "predictable", was generally positive, writing that "mystery is genuinely embodied; the reader's imagination is addressed, responds and is satisfied.
[8] In The New York Review of Books Denis Donoghue described the novel as "elegiac", "an anthology of defeats: magic, belief, prayer, love, and now perhaps poetry itself.
She argues that it is "best read as a mannered philosophical myth, or fantasy" and that Murdoch's inclusion of passages of "emotional immediacy" such as her initial description of Pattie O'Driscoll's origins and early life tends to create "jarring effects or difficulties" for readers.
[6]: 167 Jill Paton Walsh characterizes the philosophical discussions in The Time of the Angels, and particularly Marcus's book on ethics, as examples of "placed philosophy".